A film review by Craig J. Koban February 10, 2010 |
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WHEN IN ROME
Kristen Bell: Beth /Josh Duhamel: Nick / Anjelica Huston: Celeste / Danny DeVito: Al / Will Arnett: Antonio / Jon Heder: Lance / Dax Shepard: Gale / Alexis Dziena: Joan / Don Johnson: Beth's Dad
Directed by Mark Steven Johnson / Written by David Diamond and David Weissman |
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You know you are in trouble when the very first laugh in a romantic comedy does not occur until 15 minutes into it…and is not derived from one of the human participants. Yes,
the only modest chuckle to be had in WHEN IN ROME occurs dangerously late
into the film courtesy of a cell phone ring tone going off at an
inopportune time during a wedding. The
resulting comedic desperation really begins to reveal itself when
inanimate objects trump the performers for laughs. WHEN IN ROME belongs on a long
and highly disagreeable list of recent romcoms that have all asked a very
simple question: How hard
can it possibly be to make a rousing, endearing, original, funny,
passionate, and engaging romcom? If
WHEN IN ROME could speak for itself, then it would resoundingly respond by
stating, “It’s damn hard.” What’s
really disconcerting is that they have been so many innovative and
memorable examples of the genre lately, like FEVER
PITCH, FORGETTING SARAH
MARSHALL, DEFINITELY MAYBE,
KNOCKED UP, THE
40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN, and, yes, last year’s outstanding (500)
DAYS OF SUMMER. Yet,
for every one of those sublimely pleasurable romcoms there’s endless examples that fall thuddingly flat. WHEN
IN ROME is in the latter category, and at times it wears its pathetic
mediocrity like a dubious badge of honor. The first warning sign should
have occurred with a quick, cursory look at the credits: The writers for
the film are David Diamond and David Weissman, the pair that were
criminally responsible for one of the most God-awful comedies of the
previous decade in last year’s OLD DOGS
(which also incredulously neutered Robin Williams and John Travolta of of
all of their fine comic instincts). That’s
strike number one. The second
strike against the film would be that it's a deplorable comic
deadzone: WHEN IN ROME uses the most stale and rudimentary of sight gags
and slapstick to garner huge laughs, but embarrassingly fails at just
about every waking moment. The
third strike against it would be that the lead actors – despite
being attractive, charming, and appealing – have chemistry that teeters
between being woefully manufactured and wholeheartedly lacking in overall
passion. Hell, the film does
not even work as a beautiful and opulent travelogue picture:
It becomes so clear that many of the exterior shots of Rome were
not created on location, but on a backlot in New York that it all but
erodes the type of romanticism for the location that the film is trying to
stir up. Rome in WHEN
IN ROME becomes such an artificial construct that, by comparison, it makes
Pandora in AVATAR looks like a National
Geographic documentary. WHEN IN ROME (which has
definitive echoes on 1954’s THREE COINS IN A FOUNTAIN) opens in The Big
Apple where we meet a museum curator named Beth (the always adorable and
fetching Kristen Bell, who looks mostly ill at ease here trying to eek out
guffaws) that is prepping the largest exhibition of her career.
She becomes depressed early on when she has an impromptu meeting
with her ex (played in a cameo by the utterly wasted Lee Pace) where he
reveals to her that he has met the woman of his dreams and will soon be
married. This news hits Beth
quite hard, whom has been clamoring for the “right man” to settle down
with and start a life together. Her
grief gets no better with the news that her little sister, Joan (Alexis
Dziena) is engaged to an Italian man that she just met.
Beth decides to leave the
final preparations of her big assignment to her assistant and proceeds to
fly over to Rome (again, a hodgepodge of crummy second unit cinematography
and an absurdly and laughably disguised New York backlot) to spend no more
than 48 hours hooking up with her family to support her sister’s
marriage. During the
reception Beth does manage to lock eyes with a hunky and goofily debonair
klutz named Nick (Josh Duhamel), and the flirtation between the pair
continues well into the reception. Unfortunately,
Beth decides to halt any romantic attachment to the man when she sees him
with a shouldering brunette. Discouraged
more than ever, Beth drunkenly strolls over to the “Fountain of Love”
and removes five distinct coins from the water, completely oblivious to
local superstitions: Anyone
that retrieves a coin from the fountain will instantly become the object
of desire for the person that put the coin in the fountain.
Beth soon returns to her
hometown, never fully realizing what she has done, and when she attempts
to settle back into her work life she is pursued (make that stalked)
by four complete strangers whose coins she picked up out of the fountain.
One of the film’s many nagging problems is that these men are
more creepy and annoying than they are haplessly loveable and endearing: There
is a somewhat failed street magician (Jon Heder, once again proving that
he is not the stuff of movie comic gold outside of NAPOLEON
DYNAMITE), a painter (Will Arnett, proving once again how his film
roles have failed to live up to his masterfully inspired and hilarious
comic performance on TV’s ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT), a sausage kingpin
(Danny Devito, sweet and sincere in a few moments, but kind of out of his
element here) and a self-loving male model (Dax Shepard, getting the only
respectable laughs in the film in a largely scant and underwritten role).
While Beth tries as she does to avoid these men at every moment
(why she does not simply call the police and take out restraining orders
is beyond me), she is being perused by Nick, but is plagued by whether or
not he is doing so out of real love or because he is inclined to do
so because of that fountain superstition.
Any film viewer in the audience without a pea-sized brain will be
able to guess the answer to that conundrum with lightning fast
assuredness. I guess I am willing to
forgive just about any romcom for being formulaic (some of the best ones
have a narrative trajectory that we can see with reasonable accuracy from
scene one), but WHEN IN ROME’s chief fault is not its obviousness, but
with its blandness and senselessness throughout.
The premise itself is head-shaking enough and the story hits every
cookie cutter ingredient from the rom com recipe book, but what makes WHEN
IN ROME all the more forgettable and disposable is how it takes two
limitlessly attractive leads and squanders them in shrill, charmless, and
baffling slapstick antics. Scene after scene displays the performers’ discomfort; they
never really seem to have a clue as to how broad or straight to play the
gags. Moments involving a seemingly indestructible vase comes to mind, or
one involving Nick’s weak attempts at translating Beth’s speech to the
largely Italian wedding crowd. All of these scenes illicit absolute
silence in the movie theatre. Duhamel
has the right manner of dialing in cocky bravado with a bumbling idiocy
that is nice and Kristen Bell can be enormously alluring and likeable, but
here the two talented actors are more like props that fully realized
characters. Just consider one of the worst
scenes that I have seen in a film in an awfully long time:
During it Nick decides to take Bell out to a Manhattan restaurant
that serves its patrons…in complete darkness.
No. I am not
fooling you. The waitress
– wearing night vision goggles – takes the pair into a secluded and
completely unlit room where other patrons are sitting at their tables
attempting to engage one another without being able to see anything.
All of the servers and waiters can see everything, of course, which
gives them a clear advantage over the customers (especially when it comes
to issues of intimacy between the people at the tables).
Now, this scene is intolerably unfunny not only because it does not exists in
any natural plane of reality that I know of, but also because it’s also lethally bad
for how it tries to drum up cheap gags involving Bell and Duhamel bumping
into other patrons, spilling drinks, and so forth.
It’s one of those incomprehensibly wretched movie moments where
you simultaneously feel absolute pity as well as condemnation for the
actors: It’s sad to see
endowed performers reduce themselves in the ways WHEN IN ROME does. The film was directed by Mark
Steven Johnson, who previously made the touching coming-of-age drama,
SIMON BIRCH, the lamentably underrated comic book adaptation of DAREDEVIL
and the rightfully chastised adaptation of GHOST
RIDER. Despite
his recent focus on comic book efforts, Johnson has a past with comedy (he
wrote the first GRUMPY OLD MEN film), but WHEN IN ROME is so lacking in
invention, magic, and, well, laughs and romance that, if there is
any fairness in the world, he should not be allowed to touch this genre
again. Just how desperate
and unrefined are Johnson’s methods here?
There’s one moment in the film when Jon Heder’s magician
character has a personal assistant that video tapes his escapades to win
over Beth’s heart. The
assistant is revealed to be a character that has a shocking similarity
in mannerisms and voice to the character of Pedro in NAPOLEON DYNAMITE,
which is really hammered home when we learn that Efron Ramirez (who played Pedro) plays the assistant. This is a new low for comedy when characters are essentially
plagiarized from other comedies in hopes of yielding uproarious
reactions from viewers. Instances
like this are indicative of the relative worth in WHEN IN ROME, which
stumbles out of the gate and never recovers during its 91 minute running
time. |
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